Victor Cousin Quotes

Every living person and thing responds to beauty. We all thirst for it. We receive strength and renewal by seeing stirring and satisfying sites.

I believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.

I always loved aesthetics. Not particularly fashion, but an idea of beauty.

It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.

Beauty is assailed from two directions - by the cult of ugliness in the arts, and by the cult of utility in everyday life.

The sense of beauty is intuitive, and beauty itself is all that inspires pleasure without, and aloof from, and even contrarily to interest.

But when I was twelve years old I caught my first strong glimpse of one of the fundamental forces of existence, whose votary I was destined to be for life - namely, Beauty.

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.

Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not.

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

I have no ethics when it comes to art. You just do what you can to make it as beautiful as you can.

When you see or hear something beautiful, it's like that thing is transmitting a kind of energy, and if that energy helped create the work, the only thing I can do is play it when I finally show the work.

Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.

Like our attitude to love, truth and goodness, we seem to be confident about knowing what beauty is - certain, even dogmatic - until we think hard about the idea, whereupon all confidence flies away.

Good painting is like good cooking; it can be tasted, but not explained.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

Beauty is whatever gives joy.

Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness.

I think I was always obsessed with esthetics.

Beauty awakens the soul to act.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Never has there been a close study of how necessary to a man are the experiences which we clumsily call aesthetic

The beauty of art is that it allows you to slow down, and for a moment, things that once seemed unfamiliar become precious to you.

We call beauty that which supplies us with a particular pleasure.

If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being.